Ontario smartphone said to run BlackBerry 10.3

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A rumored Blackberry phone codenamed Ontario has whipped by in a leaked benchmark, though a speedier device demon may be waiting in the wings.

According to a Geekbench Browser test, Ontario is set to run BlackBerry 10.3, sport a quad-core 2.15GHz Snapdragon 800 processor and 2GB of RAM. The last BlackBerry flagship, the Z10, only ran a dual-core chip.

As BlackBerry has previously announced, it doesn't have plans to leave the smartphone business, and it's inked a deal with Foxconn to produce cheaper handsets.

The manufacturing contract agreement would have the Chinese company create devices while BlackBerry supplied the software.

Whiplash caused by BlackBerry 10.3? (credit: Geekbench Browser)

BlackBerry to go octa-core?

N4BB has it on the authority of sources that BlackBerry plans to use a 2.3GHz Snapdragon MSM8974 quad-core Krait processor in Ontario.

The phone is part of its O-series, and the site claimed the MSM8974 will also appear in its W-series (or QWERTY) phones and B-series (all touch).

It's a fine chip, but N4BB sources also say that BlackBerry plans to utilize the Snapdragon MSM8994 in a device due in 2015.

The MSM8994 is built on the 20nm HKMG process, and boasts an octa-core, 64-bit architecture.

The high-end chip also features an Adreno 430 GPU, 1600MHz 4GB RAM LPDDR3 PoP and cores that can hit frequencies of 2.5GHz with 4MB L2 cache.

It's no guarantee the 64-bit device or Ontario will ever come to market, especially if BlackBerry decides its resources may be better spent elsewhere. However, we'll keep an ear to the ground.